


baby, this rain changes everything (my darling, i’m ready)

by kattyshack



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, Forgiveness, Introspection, Love Confessions, POV Theon Greyjoy, Redemption, Resurrection, Reunions, Romance, Sexual Content, Tenderness, i tagged it both compliant and divergent bc you can’t tell me this didn’t happen, it’s a 20k bonus feature ya welcome, this isn’t even fic it’s canon now, we just didn’t see it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 04:03:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19760200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattyshack/pseuds/kattyshack
Summary: What is dead may never die… But rises again, harder and stronger.Theon falls a hero in the godswood at Winterfell, but when his spirit tries to move on, it turns out the gods have other plans for him.(title from “i’m with you,” by vance joy)





	baby, this rain changes everything (my darling, i’m ready)

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: at last, it is DONE (which means i can get back to posting other things regularly!). this fic really wriggled its way into my heart and it’s become quite dear to me, so i hope you all love it as much as i do!
> 
> (i guess i’ll also say that this fic isn’t particularly dany-friendly i guess? i’ve held to the villainous arc for her from the start, but i don’t approach it as a negative so much bc frankly i prefer her that way. jon’s character is dissected too, bc imo he should have been held more accountable by the fandom this year and instead he got a pass for... no reason, idk, bc god knows if sansa had traded winterfell for love or whatever the fandom would have eviscerated her, sooooo! 
> 
> (yeah there’s your disclaimer that i didn’t want to write but i don’t feel like fielding any hot takes in the comments either so here you go, i done told you, there will be no further questions at this time or ever bc calm down, greg, it’s soccer)
> 
> shoutout to light and love of my life sarah for being my first ever beta, bc let’s face it i couldn’t sort through an unanticipated whopping 20k of fic all on my own! xx

**.**

_So bury me and lock me in_  
_I'll find a way to rise again_  
_I'll break away to find you where you are_

 _From the grave I’ll crawl_  
_For you I’d pay the cost_  
_To be in your arms again_

 _— James Arthur // ‘From the Grave’ —_

**.**

_Don’t die so far from the sea._

But he takes a spear through the belly on the mainland, in the heart of the godswood, under the watch of gods that had never been his. His own blood pools in his mouth and the world goes black. The flicker of fire blurs his vision, the darkness encroaching, swallowing him whole, smoke in his throat…

 _You’re a good man, Theon._ The flutter of raven’s wings, the blink of inky black, over-large eyes. _Thank you._

The shadows take him.

 _I’m not touching you._ Her arms around him, a sob, a sigh. His fingers curled ‘round hers, his hand tangled in her hair. The way she smelled, of sweet wine and woodsmoke and hot springs in the forest…

_Where will you go?_

He should have stayed with her.

**.**

There is no salt in his veins, no iron in his heart. Only sweat and snowflakes, salvation in Bran’s forgiveness, and something like hope in a future that could never be.

Because he is dead, run through by a spear of ice, wielded by Death himself.

Theon Greyjoy had fought and lost and pledged to all the right people, all the wrong ones, betrayed and sinned and lost himself to his own desires and to all that was beyond his control, until he wasn’t Theon Greyjoy at all anymore.

Until she had told him that he was.

Until she had asserted herself at the end of an archer’s bow and accepted her fate, whatever it may be, so long as it was hers. So long as it belonged to Sansa Stark.

She’d done what he hadn’t been able to. Even in death, when his life flashes through the forefront of his mind, Theon tries not to hate himself for it. He’d been a stupid, senseless boy, caught up in a war within himself as assuredly as he’d been thrust into one in his home country, when he’d never truly known what _home_ was

 _A prisoner, a hostage, a ward…_ Call it what you will, but he never knew who he was, who he was allowed to be. Unwanted by his own father, offered to the enemy as a sacrifice, a token of good will when there had been no goodness to be found in war-torn Westeros. There was only blood and bitterness, and Theon had been caught between them both.

_Stark or Greyjoy._

Did it matter, really, when he’d never known who he was besides those names, and the opposing duties which befell him?

Until…

_Your name is Theon Greyjoy._

_Help me, Theon. Please._

There is no salt in his veins, no iron in his heart. Only his sins behind him, Bran’s forgiveness to absolve him, and Sansa nestled deep in the ends of his nerves and the tingle in his fingertips. All he’d failed to be, and all he could have been in spite of that.

_Lady Sansa… If you’ll have me._

It was with the sea in his soul that he’d been born, but it is not in saltwater that Theon Greyjoy meets oblivion.

And so the Drowned God does not take him.

**.**

_He is appraised by seastorm eyes, through the murky depths of the waves which lap upon the shore above._

_“You’ve been blessed in my name, boy.” The words are naught but an echo in his ears, dreamlike, resonant but not quite real. “But you are not mine. You are not even your own.”_

_Seaweed tangles between his gloved hands. It reminds him of her hair._

_“Not yet.”_

**.**

When Theon returns from battle — not unscathed, but _alive_ , somehow, by the grace of cruel gods, by the insistence of one who wouldn’t accept him without the sea in his lungs — he knows what he wants, as much as he’d known on what he believed to be his last night on this earth.

He awakens, ground like ice beneath him, gasping in the cold winter air like nothing’s ever tasted so sweet, like he can’t get enough.

But there is more that he wants; more that he had been made for.

_Where will you go?_

Home, to Winterfell. Back to her.

**.**

The horn cuts through the frigid air, slicing it like a knife, and Theon steps between the opened gates on shaky legs.

He is damp and dirty, soaked through with blood and melted snow — saltwater, too, if his vision of the Drowned God had been anything more than a near-death hallucination.

He’ll never know for sure. But he is here now, and that is what matters.

Whispers follow him as he approaches the castle, a rising current of panic and awe and disbelief. They’d thought him dead, though none had been able to recover his body. He’d vanished, with nothing but a drying pool of blood at the base of the heart tree to mark his disappearance; but then, that blood could have been any fallen soldier’s.

Theon ascends the weather-worn steps to his childhood prison, his keep, his home, even after all these years he does not know.

He had never pledged himself to a place, in any case. It had always been to a person, to the thrum of a heartbeat he could feel in their embrace.

In the time between himself and Reek and the man he is now, there is only one other heartbeat besides his own — and he’d wanted his own to cease, more times than he could count then or remember now — and he wants to feel it again.

Feel it, revel in it, swear himself to it, body and soul and sword and any other way she might have him.

He needs this, needs her. He’d been rejected by his family’s god and allowed to come back, all because his heart belongs to her, with no room for anything else.

Battle-worn and weary, caked with mud, his cloak swishes against his legs as he hurries his steps, as others are heard shuffling around another set of steps, down the next corridor. The wind whistles through the open archways, and those other rushed footfalls echo on the breeze.

He knows those footsteps. He recognizes the vibrations in the ground when she walks upon it.

And then — there she is, spinning around the corner in skirts of mourning black, threaded through with gold. His heart clenches at the sight of his house colours, and then releases as his eyes drink in the rest of her.

Hair braided and pulled back, that spot of fiery red colour is all that’s left to her. Her eyes are blue but glassy, like the surface of the hot springs when they’ve frozen over, so that you can never know what’s happening beneath that cool veneer of winter.

But Theon knows. He sees it crack when she looks at him, when they lock eyes the way they had so many times before.

_In the kennels._

_On her wedding night._

_When she reminded him of who he was._

_When they’d jumped the ramparts together._

_When they’d run, when he’d passed her on to better protectors._

_When he’d seen her again, and never wanted to stop looking._

And now, he doesn’t have to. He’ll never drink his fill and he never needs to look away.

Sansa’s skirts whirl ‘round her ankles, where her boots are laced and tired from use. They look as though they might ache, and Theon wants nothing more than to relieve her of all that hurt which hangs so heavy upon her.

Sansa stops, several paces short of reaching him, flanked by guards where he is accompanied by nothing but that which rings in his ears —

_Want her take her love her._

She stares. Only stares, unable to move, chilled to the bone.

 _Alive._ He’s alive. Theon can feel it in the tremble of his bones when she looks at him, unblinking and unbelieving.

Because she’d believed him dead, he knows, lost to her without so much as one last look between them. She grieved and yet accepted it as truth, for all whom she loved had been taken from her as such. He knows that, because the same holds true for him. Why should the gods grant her mercy now?

And yet, here he stands. And he hopes that he is mercy enough.

Her lips part, the question rolling off her tongue, equal parts prayer and hardly daring to believe it — _“How?”_

Theon doesn’t know how to answer that, because he doesn’t really know at all.

So he shrugs, tired and unsure and just wanting her arms around him again. His gaze flickers from her face to her feet and back again, forcefully, because he has to let her see the look in his eye when he says it, when he tells her, broken and hoarse and begging her to touch him so he knows that it’s _real_ —

“I didn’t want to go.”

It’s quiet for no more than a moment, and then Sansa’s choking out a sob and running towards him, the same way she had when he’d returned to her the first time. Quick as a whip but she glides like a dream, and they’re in each other’s arms before either of them can consider what it all means.

That doesn’t matter, when Theon catches her and holds her tight. The _how_ and _why_ and _at_ _what cost?_ is all a medley of insignificance, because he’s here and that’s all he’d ever wanted. To be at Winterfell, welcomed as a member of their family, loved by the pretty girl with bright red hair, to be the storybook hero she used to dream about.

To _be someone_.

And she’s made him feel like he could be a hero from the start.

**.**

The North has seen giants and dragons and White Walkers and a king risen from the dead, and so, once the initial shock’s passed, Theon’s reappearance doesn’t seem to mean much to them. There are whispers, perhaps there always will be, but no one dares speak to him of it.

_Perhaps this is how the Old Gods thank you, when you’ve survived where you don’t belong. Theon Greyjoy is no Stark, after all. But when you’ve danced with the wolves for so long, they’re not like to let you go._

That’s all well and good, so far as he’s concerned. Long gone is the crazed desire to make a name for himself that everyone would know, that would bear songs and far-fetched tales in the war stories yet to come.

He is the hero of the godswood now, but it doesn't matter to him who remembers his name now that it’s over.

Bran is stoic and perhaps the only person who remains unsurprised, only nodding curtly when Theon passes by on his way to the post-battle celebrations. Arya remains aloof and wary, though Theon does not blame her for that, merely ducks his head respectfully when he walks past her. She says nothing to him, no japes or barbs or accusations; she simply nods back. He wonders if she'd seen his fallen body once she’d slain the Night King, and supposed he’d earned some sliver of forgiveness after.

He won’t ask for it or even about it. He will only accept what is offered to him.

Sansa waits for him outside the doors to the great hall, beyond which come the sounds of laughter and music and the clink of cups. The corridor is quieter, darker, the candlelight flickering on Sansa’s necklace, painting patterns across her skin like the sunlight on the sea, in the waterfall of red down her back.

When he stops in front of her, hardly a pace away when he bows, she smiles softly, but her eyes study him from top to bottom, intense and unyielding. He’d been bathed and stitched up, examined by the maester and deemed well enough, and garbed in blacks and greys, gold buttons down his vest. The maester had given him a salve for his hands as well; he would never have his missing fingers back, but his skin could heal. Even so, he keeps his gloves on for now.

“You look well,” Sansa tells him, her voice catching. The candlelight reflects the sheen of tears in her eyes, but her smile tells him they’re happy ones. “There’s just one thing missing, I think…”

She removes her sigil pin from her dress, and tucks it into the strap of his jerkin. He would refuse the favour, if she’d let him.

“My lady, I don’t —”

“Don’t tell me you don’t deserve this,” Sansa cuts in. She lifts an eyebrow, as if daring him to challenge her further when she adds, “You saved my brother. You died for us, Theon. Now you get to live for yourself.”

Her palm lays flat and warm against his heart. He wonders if she can feel it quicken when she touches him.

The words come thick and raspy when he says, “Thank you, Lady Sansa.”

She touches his cheek, and catches the tear that rolls down it on her thumb.

**.**

The music is as loud and bawdy as the laughter, chased down by free-flowing ale and sweet wines. It reminds Theon of better times at Winterfell, when the castle belonged to the Starks with no one to contest their rule.

There were no wars, no king and queen around every corner, no biting winter winds… It had been a time of peace. Theon wonders if they’ll ever have that again. Not like tonight, much as it reminds him of the past. Because the fog of memory may hang in the hall, in the shadows and the songs and the victory that had preceded this celebration, but it leaves him feeling unsettled all the same.

He looks to the head table and understands why.

“What are you looking at, Greyjoy?” Tyrion Lannister slides onto the bench next to him, ale sloshing in its pewter goblet. His gaze follows Theon’s and he chuckles. “Ah, I see. My wife, is it?”

Theon sets his cup down with more force than is necessary. “She’s not your wife anymore.”

“Perhaps we would have been better off if she were.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. He can’t argue it — he’d been there through Ramsay, hadn’t he? — but he doesn’t like it, either.

“But you’re right, Greyjoy,” Tyrion allows, jovial as the night allows when he takes a draw from his ale. “She’s not Lady Lannister any longer, nor Lady Bolton. Tell me, is it true that she and you jumped the ramparts of this very castle, and survived to tell the tale?”

“We survived much worse than that.” His gaze flicks from Sansa to his plate. He tears a chunk of bread with his teeth, mouth full in the hopes that it will dissuade Lannister from talking to him.

Of course, it doesn’t.

“Yes, I suppose you did.” Tyrion sighs, then gives him a once-over as if to determine his wounds himself. “You lost your cock and your life, and I daresay that once upon a time those two things were one and the same to you, weren’t they?”

Theon drinks deeply from his cup — neither ale nor wine, only water, but it fortifies him just as well — and does not answer.

“There’s no shame in it,” Tyrion continues on. “I would feel the same, if it were me.”

“Is there a reason you’re telling me this?” Theon wants to know, unable to resist any longer. Surely a reaction will bore the man and he’ll leave him be sooner rather than later.

“Not particularly,” he admits. He tilts his cup back and forth thoughtfully (or drunkenly, mayhaps). “Perhaps I’m simply trying to goad you into getting off your sorry arse and doing something with those sad, longing eyes of yours.”

Theon looks at him, surprised and a bit suspicious at this turn in a conversation he never wanted to be having in the first place. “And what do you care about any of that?”

“I knew Sansa as a girl, too, don’t forget. She deserved better than she got.” Tyrion levels him with another look and shrugs. His next words are muffled somewhat by the goblet as he drinks. “I suppose you’ll do.”

“That’s not your decision to make.”

“No, but love seems to have mollified the Dragon Queen somewhat. I wonder if it will do likewise for the Lady of Winterfell.” Tyrion reaches for the decanter. Bright gold liquid splashes onto the table. “This may all be the rantings of a foolish man, but…” He shrugs again.

Theon thinks they’re exactly that. Does the man really think that a declaration of his desires to Sansa will persuade her to forge an easier alliance with Daenerys Targaryen? What does one thing have to do with the other?

He’d been allowed back to walk these mortal grounds, but Theon will not use this blessing from the Drowned God to play the pawn in someone else’s political game. He did not come back for this.

He’d come back for _her_.

And so, he returns his attention to the head table, where a small crowd of wildlings have gathered to cheer their king.

 _Or their warden, as that’s the title left to him now. Their fellow, maybe._ Truth be told, Theon doesn’t know if the wildlings take a king or not; he doesn’t much care. All he knows is that Jon Snow took to the sky astride a dragon, and there’s a knot of something like resentment deep in Theon’s stomach — right where the Night King’s spear had sliced — because Jon hadn’t been on the ground with the rest of him.

_The Starks don’t belong on the backs of dragons._

The man is quiet and brooding as ever, breaking character when he laughs at Tormund or shares a look with the Dragon Queen over his shoulder. Something about it makes Theon uneasy, no matter what Tyrion Lannister says of love. He would not claim to know the intimacies of their pact himself, but the Starks have never done well in their dalliances with the South, and the Targaryens have never been known for their honour.

Their families do not survive together, he knows, as they’ve preferred to oust the other from power, until they are nothing but names in history books.

Sansa smiles indulgently at Jon, but the happiness drains as soon as she catches his eye, which is fixed on the Dragon Queen. The edges of her mouth quirk down and she excuses herself, courteous as ever but abrupt, too, and Theon feels the need to follow suit.

“There you go, then,” Tyrion says, pleased, when he leaves the table. Theon pretends not to hear him.

He follows the echo of Sansa’s footsteps, growing louder the farther they walk away from the hall and all the jubilant noise within. The music fades, lyrical strings lost to the late-night breeze that whistles through the walls of the keep. The firelight shudders, shadows flickering across the ground.

“Sansa?” Theon calls her name on the catwalk, when he’s just about to catch up to her. The overhang offers some relief from the wind, and it’s not as cold as it used to be, besides. “Are you alright?”

She stops, turns to wait for him. There are fires lit here, too, orange flames that pop in the breeze, and reflect off her hair like they had in the corridor before the feast. Theon adjusts the strap of his jerkin, securing the direwolf pin she’d given to him.

“Jon’s our family, Theon,” she says when he’s halted next to her. She does not lie or pretend that all is well, and her truthfulness makes his heart ache. “ _Ours._ And we don’t fare well in the capital. We don’t survive. He shouldn’t belong to her. He’ll die for it, sure as I would have died for Joffrey.”

“The queen seems to… love him,” he tries to console her, recalling what Tyrion Lannister had said to him earlier. But the words feel less than comforting now, when Sansa scoffs at the meaninglessness of them.

“Does it matter?” she asks, bitterness on her tongue as she looks out onto the ashen courtyard. They’ll need to rebuild again. “My father loved my mother. So did Littlefinger, and then he loved me, too. Jaime Lannister loved Cersei. We all loved Robb. I loved Joffrey. It was love, all in different ways, but it all had the same end, didn’t it? They’re all dead, or as good as. Since when has love saved any of us?”

He yearns to give her something, some hope in all this, so Theon says, “It saved me. If it means anything to you, my lady.”

Sansa looks to him now, her features softening. She touches his cheek, just the same as she had earlier, her hand so soft upon the rough stubble and scars of his face.

“Of course that means something to me,” she assures him, so ardently that he must believe her. Sansa has never lied to him before. “It means… Theon, I can’t say what it means. I’m sorry if I’ve made it seem anything but.”

He smiles, and her thumb traces the upward tilt of his mouth. He wonders if she does it on purpose. “It’s been a day at most. And you’ve had other matters on your mind.”

“Yes…” Her eyes search his before she drops her hand to fidget with her fingers. Theon wants to kiss that nervous twitch away. “It’s just… The Starks die when we go south. We don’t belong there.”

Something clicks then, some decision from so long ago, whose ramifications never left her. “We never came for you.”

Sansa shakes her head, dismissing it. “I understand. We were at war. Robb had choices to make that shouldn’t have fallen to such a young man, and yet there he was. And what good would it have done, really, for a Lannister hostage to be recovered?”

“It would have spared you so much, my lady.”

It’s her turn to smile, but the gesture falls short. “None of us were spared. Why should I be any different?”

_Because you are good and sweet and kind, and you know no other way._

Theon takes a deep breath. “Sansa, I —”

“I’m keeping you from the celebration,” she interrupts. She’s still toying with her hands. “We have much to be grateful for.”

“And much to worry over still.” He takes hold of her wrists, gently so as not to startle her. Even through the leather of his gloves, he can feel how warm she is, how her pulse skips when he touches her. His does as well.

“Yes,” she agrees, with a rush of breath out between her lips. “But at least I won’t face it alone. At least you’re here.”

“No one would have let you alone, even if I wasn’t. Bran and Arya and —”

 _Jon_ , he thinks, but can no longer bring himself to say.

“No, you’re right. But we’ve all been apart so long…” She trails off, looking out across the grounds of her home again. “We love each other, but this war’s not done yet. It tore us apart at the start. I don’t know that we’re meant to see it through together. I just — there’s this feeling I have, that there’s so much left, and I don’t know how any of it’s going to go.”

Theon curls his fingers tighter around hers. “I won’t leave you.”

She squeezes back. “I know.”

“I’m sorry,” he says next, because there’s so much he wants to say and now that he’s begun, he doesn’t want to stop.

Sansa’s brow furrows in confusion. “What for?”

_Leaving you to begin with. Not laying my sword at your feet and making you my queen. Pledging fealty to anyone else._

It would be treason to say so aloud.

Instead, he tells her something just as true. “For taking so long to come back.”

“But you came back. In more ways than one.” She places her hand, still held by his, on his heart, to feel it beating, as if to prove to herself that it’s real. “That’s all I wanted, however long it took.”

His heart stutters beneath her palm. “You should want for better.”

“No, Theon. The best have always come back to me. Brienne, Arya, Bran, Jon… you. You’ve never given up. You’ve all come back, come home. At least…” She shakes her head. “Well, at least Jon’s come home in one piece. I can’t say whether it will happen again. He’s every bit the Northern fool I warned him not to be. I was stupid to think he’d listen.”

“He should have,” Theon says, and shuffles forward a step.

Sansa smiles again, just as sadly as the time before. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that, now. Your queen is displeased with me as it is. I don’t want her to begrudge you of her good graces as well.”

He does not know if now is the right time to tell her. But he’d lost time before, and when he’d risen he knew what he wanted, knew it in his bones. Now that he is here, what should stop him from asking for it?

He doesn’t deserve her, he knows that. But, fantasy or not, the Drowned God had told him that he belonged to her already. Why shouldn’t he tell her so, even if nothing else comes from it?

“Sansa…” Theon looks down, to their hands tangled together, to their bodies nearly pressed against one another’s, if only he could find the courage to. If only she wants him to.

He lifts his chin to meet her eye again, steady and blue, darker with the sun long set, but the firelight catches her irises in shades of indigo. It reminds him of the sea in the middle of the night, of the waves that had taken him down and down, into the depths of the Drowned God’s ocean.

“The Iron Islands pledged to Daenerys, and that was hardly for love,” he goes on, when her eyes ask him to continue. “The Ironborn don’t do anything for love. She had what we needed and Yara wouldn’t negotiate with anyone else — who else was there? We took a chance on a foreign queen because the southron ones had never been kind to us.”

“I understand that,” Sansa tells him, but he shakes his head. This isn’t what he wants to say, isn’t what he needs so badly to explain.

“But I — Sansa, you have to know that my heart, it’s” — he holds her hands closer now — “it’s never belonged to anyone in the right way. It was torn in two between my father and yours, then myself and Robb, and then… Ramsay, he took it and made it _nothing_ and I — when you came back, when _I_ came back…”

He’s fumbling, stumbling over his words like some drunken fool when he hasn’t had a drop. So he takes a breath to steady himself, and then his hand sweeps over the back of hers, keeping it on his heart, because —

“It’s yours, Sansa.” He searches her face, earnest and praying that she’ll take what he has to give. “It’s not what it should be, but it belongs to you. _I_ belong to you.”

“You don’t belong to anyone, Theon.” She touches his face again, traces the scar along his cheekbone. “You’re _you_. You’re allowed to have that.”

_Your name is Theon Greyjoy._

“I want to be yours. I fought for Winterfell because it was the right thing to do, the only thing I could do. I owed it to your family, to Bran, but you…” He sighs when her hand finds its way to his hair, smoothing the curls that bounce back into place as soon as she’s done, so she does it again. “Sansa, what’s left of me is all thanks to you. I’m half a heart without you.”

“You’re so much more than that,” she insists, like she wants him to believe that he’s _more_ and he’s better than he could ever believe of himself. “The things that I want don’t make it, Theon. Love and family and something better for all of us, it all falls apart. I don’t want to lose you because I want you, because I’m being selfish again.”

Every word between them is a desperate plea, and Theon wants them both to give into it.

“It’s been so long since I’ve wanted anything just to want it. I never thought I’d want anything again.” He pulls her palm to his lips to kiss it. “Be selfish with me, please.”

Sansa’s eyes flick between his, as if to make sure that she’s allowed to want this, to want him without fear that the gods would separate them again. And then —

She takes half a step forward, for that’s all it takes to close the gap between them. Her hand slides to his shoulder and her lips press to his. He doesn’t hesitate in pressing back, a relieved sigh escaping, harsh and deep, when she doesn’t pull away. He holds her elbow in one hand, while the other pauses at her hip before he takes it.

Slowly, their lips coax the other’s apart, deepening the kiss into a swirl of oblivion that stops Theon’s heart more assuredly than death had. He nips at her lip and her tongue strokes his, and his heart picks up pace again. Her fingers thread through his curls and he pulls her in closer, every curve of her body molded to every lean line of his.

When she sighs, he inhales sharply and kisses her harder. His hand slides from her elbow around to her back, where he can tangle it into the ends of her hair. He wants to take his gloves off, to _feel_ her, but that would mean letting her go. He’s not ready to stop this, not yet.

He doesn’t know where he wants to touch her most. So his hands wander, from her hair to her hips, back up to cradle her face. He doesn’t stop kissing her, only pauses in the deep exploration of her mouth to pluck smaller kisses from her lips when they need a second to breathe. But then one or the other starts it off anew, and her arms circle around his shoulders to hold him to her.

Sansa is as soft and warm as the Northern winds are cold, and yet she anchors him here, with her. He’d stolen her from her home, only for her to be restored to her rightful place therein.

Now here she is — Theon wraps her up in his arms, and the flutter of her heart matches the stutter of his — and she’s with him.

**.**

Where she goes, he follows. Dutifully, often silently unless he’s prompted to speak his mind. Though, to be honest, he hasn’t much to offer; he’s grown weary of these wars.

It is easy to forget such things, even if it’s only in the small pockets of time he spends with Sansa between another missive, another repair, another ledger or meeting or concern of one of the lords.

But when he offers his arm and she takes it, the butter-smooth leather of her glove tucked securely in the crook of his elbow as they walk, wooden planks creaking or snow crunching beneath their boots, it’s easy to pretend that there’s nothing else but this.

She is warm, worried all the time, but she’ll give him a smile or a squeeze to his hand. And when he cracks a joke that reminds them both of who he used to be, only to stumble over his words to remind them that he is not quite, the crease between her brows fades in her laughter. It is short-lived, but nonetheless sweet for it.

He does not try to steal a kiss and neither does she. They are seldom left alone and, when they are, there’s no telling how long it will last. So she’ll sneak one to his cheek when he escorts her to her chambers, or he will linger over one left to the back of her hand, and for now it must be enough.

Once, she tells him _thank you_. The words confuse him but he smiles through it when he asks her _what for?_.

“For you,” she replies simply, quietly. She interlaces their fingers for the space of a heartbeat before they’re interrupted, and step quickly away from one another when Lord Royce announces his presence.

For the duration of the meeting, Theon’s hand itches to touch her, and his lips tingle as if she’d kissed him again.

**.**

Things had not, as expected, gotten less worrisome following the fall of the White Walkers. Their defeat had given way to the true tensions which snaked insidiously through the North, in the air and underfoot, in furiously whispered conversations and dark, furtive and suspicious glances, every word, every look, dripping with accusation and trepidation and all manner of things which disturbed the already tenuous alliance between the Stark and Targaryen forces.

Theon’s not quite sure of his place among them.

His sister is his queen in truth, should Daenerys make good on her end of their bargain and grant the Iron Islands their independence. But he meant what he said to Sansa — his heart belongs to her, and his faith remains with the Starks. They had done everything for him, and he owes them for all that he had done _to_ them, no matter how they’ve forgiven him now.

What has Daenerys Targaryen done for him? She’d spared no men to save Yara when she’d been captured, had not asked after his sister until he had arrived on Winterfell’s doorstep. They were meant to be allies, and it seems that the Greyjoys mean little to her unless she could gain something from them.

Perhaps that is all any alliance is. But Theon had known the Starks to forge friendship and genuine affection between themselves and their bannermen, to inspire love for one another and good faith within.

Here in this war council, though, no such feelings reside.

Daenerys and Sansa are at odds as they ever are, no trust or love lost between them. Theon looks worriedly to Sansa when Jon cuts in, declaring that the North will stand by its word — _his_ word, Theon muses, a touch of spite in the thought — and march south to take King’s Landing.

Sansa frowns, exchanging a look with Arya that speaks volumes though neither sister says another word.

“Your Grace.” Theon clears his throat, though it never does him much good; his voice is always rough these days, dry and cracked like sandstone on the beach. “If I may… The men we have left, they need more time to heal. Lady Sansa is right, we need to speak with the captains before we determine our course of action.”

“I’ll stop you there,” Daenerys cuts in, curt and cold and clearly agitated, “and remind you of your family’s oath to me. We have an agreement, do we not?”

Theon catches Sansa’s eye, and stands a little straighter. He did not return from the cusp of death only to cower beneath the weight of disapproval and disdain.

_Reek._

_Rhymes with freak._

_Rhymes with weak._

But Reek is dead. Only Theon Greyjoy came back.

He clasps his hands behind his back and nods at the Dragon Queen, eyes unblinking, refusing to cast downwards. “With respect, Your Grace, but we’ll only lose more men if we march now.”

Daenerys blinks, just once, more a threat than anything else. “I lost an entire army to the Starks’ cause. The debt should be repaid.”

The silence that follows is heavy. A few glances are cast his way, unsettled. He’d openly defied the queen, when he holds no position of power himself to hide behind. What is a prince of the Iron Islands compared to her? The North never held him in high regard as it was, and now Jon’s given the country to her.

Tyrion Lannister looks between him and Sansa and Daenerys, as though sussing out the potential fallout. Whatever he determines, he doesn’t say it aloud. Not immediately, in any case.

The council is adjourned, the plan set just as Daenerys preferred it, much to the displeasure of half the attendants present. Sansa slants another one of those sad smiles at him from across the table, but the Starks are converging on Jon now, and Theon thinks it best not to approach. So he merely bows and turns to leave.

Before he can, Tyrion bids him stay. Sansa, Bran, and Arya have ushered Jon out with them, headed off for further business of which Theon would rather not know. The looks between them all had been enough to make anyone uneasy, and he remembers all their tempers well enough to know to keep a safe distance for the time being.

The door shuts with an echo of finality, leaving the pair alone, but Tyrion has only just begun — though he doesn’t beat around the bush to do it.

“When we last spoke, my intentions were not that you’d make an idiot of yourself in the middle of a war council,” he says, almost lamenting the fact. “I had hoped you’d keep your feelings for Lady Sansa a touch more subtle.”

Theon’s jaw sets. “I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

The other man chuckles, humorless and tired. “You and Jon Snow are one and the same, truly, did you know that?”

There was a time, not so long ago, that Theon would have been humbled by such praise. He’d sought Jon’s forgiveness, his favour, any scrap he might toss his way. It had been a balm to Theon’s broken soul to know that a man Robb once held in such high esteem could find it in his heart to forgive him of his shortcomings, his sins.

Now, though, it’s almost as it was when they were boys. The suggestion of a likeness between them makes him grit his teeth. However true it may be, he refuses it when he grinds out his denial — “We’re not.”

“Both in love with formidable women,” Tyrion points out, like that’s enough, “and wholly incapable of using it to your advantage.”

That strikes a nerve Theon didn’t know he still had. But in the days, nights, weeks, since he’d returned from the Drowned God’s waves, he had been finding pieces of his old self. It’s almost as though he’s been allowed to begin again, perfectly new, all of his old hurts and mistakes and missteps nothing but scars and cloudy memories.

They weigh heavy upon him still, but he came back knowing that Theon Greyjoy could be made up of more than his past.

Whatever Tyrion Lannister had meant to imply, his words rankle and Theon lets them get the best of him.

“What would you have me do, then?” he demands. “Tell her to make nice with a queen who would force her hand? Manipulate her into adopting pretty courtesies and good manners? She did that in King’s Landing. She tried to do it again when she was sold to Ramsay. And what good did it ever do her?”

_What good did coerced and false courtesies ever do either of us?_

“Daenerys isn’t Joffrey or Cersei or Ramsay,” Tyrion counters.

“Isn’t she?” He shakes his head, trying to clear it, to make everything make sense, but it’s all a mess in his mind. He only knows what he feels, and what he feels is nothing good. “I can’t speak to your family, but she uses those dragons like Ramsay used his hounds.”

Theon knows how damnable it is to give voice to these thoughts. But it is no secret that he’d only done as Yara bid, and that he’d returned to Winterfell for the Starks alone. He’d once stolen the castle in his father’s name, and nearly ruined everything he’d ever had.

_I made a choice… and I chose wrong._

He can’t afford to do it again. He won’t. If he has to choose again, then surely the Dragon Queen must know where his loyalties lie. His heart, too, for he wears Sansa’s direwolf pin right above it — and isn’t the heart a more precious and dangerous thing, all at once?

Tyrion scoffs at the comparison. “I’ve heard stories about Ramsay Bolton. Daenerys doesn’t use her dragons for sport.”

No, that much Theon knows. But he also knows that feeling in his gut, of panic and unease, when she calls upon her dragons to burn. ‘Fire and blood’ may be the Targaryens’ words, but that’s no way to rule a kingdom. Theon cannot separate what she has done, what she plans to do, from what had been done to him for so many years.

“You really haven’t spent enough time with the girl to speak so traitorously of her,” Tyrion adds.

Despite the logic of that, it’s not quite logic that gives Theon pause.

_Fire and blood. Flayed men and charred bodies. Smoke rising from the ships, billowing clouds of it above the sea. The spark of flame in their eyes, gleaming, smiling, sickening._

_The rush of water in his ears…_

He shakes his head again. “I spent enough time with Ramsay to know a madman when I see one.”

“Best watch your tongue,” Tyrion warns him, “unless you want to lose that, too.”

“Would she have it cut from my mouth?”

“Would you care to find out?”

It’s Theon’s turn to scoff. “And you say she’s not mad.”

“She has a good heart. She thinks she’s doing the right thing.”

Now, he snorts. None of it’s funny, simply unbelievable that they’re wasting their time with this. “Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing. It’s why we do it. It doesn’t make it true.”

That pulls a reluctant smile from Tyrion. “Quite the philosopher, aren’t you? Never would have expected it of you.”

“I bent the knee to Robb when he was declared King in the North,” Theon tells him, hating himself for the memories. “I was the first to pledge my sword to him, and then I abandoned him for another cause. For my own selfish gain, as if I’d never loved any of them at all. Everything I did after that, everything that was done to me, was a living hell.”

_Reek._

_I don’t want to be forgiven._

He could die and return a thousand times over, and Theon doesn’t believe it would ever be enough.

“I never should have left the Starks,” he says, for that says it all. “I’m not leaving Sansa now.”

“How very noble,” Tyrion commends him, and takes it away in another breath when he adds, “and very treasonous.”

“She’ll finish what Robb started. I know she will. And I’m not going to be on the wrong side when she does.”

“So it’s about winning, then?”

Theon looks at him, dead in the eye. Another ability he’s recovered since his return. “It’s about doing the right thing.”

“Ah. I see what you’ve done there. Very clever, Theon Greyjoy.” Tyrion chuckles despite himself. “Never expected that of you, either.”

For once, whether it’s the right thing or not, Theon thinks that it might be, if nothing else, at least _good_.

**.**

He does not sleep well, hasn’t for as long as he can remember. He found solace in it at first, but then he would wake and lament that he had not died, had not been freed of his torment, and soon enough sleep became just another way to hurt.

Now, he tosses and turns, the rush of water in his ears. Visions of the shores on Pyke, waves lapping at the jagged rocks and over the sand, golden in the sunlight and grey in the storms…

They’ve swam before, in better days, in the hot springs at Winterfell. Jumping, splashing, shrieking with glee. He wonders if he could take Sansa to the sea and swim with her there.

_Long red hair, darkened to scarlet, water dripping down her pale back… Eyes blue like the sea around her, like the sky above, sunlight sprinkling diamonds upon the tides… Lips chapped and dotted with droplets of saltwater, so that when he kisses her she tastes tart and sweet, and like he’ll die if he doesn’t taste her deeper._

_He could make her laugh as they float on their backs, rocking gently in the cradle of the lapping waves. He would hold her hand, no gloves between them. Skin-to-skin, he could touch her and not feel ashamed._

_Sansa…_

_Gods, but he loves her so._

He does not sleep, but he dreams of her all the same.

**.**

It’s late afternoon when Sansa finds him in the godswood.

Theon sits at the base of the heart tree, perched upon a rock and staring out across the icy cover of one of the hot springs. Steam curls from the surface, like the water is just about to crack the relentless cold which covers it. Winter has begun to fade, but the snows remain upon them, clinging.

The ground crunches beneath Sansa’s boots as she approaches. Theon turns to her with a soft smile; he always looks softly upon her, as though he can’t help himself.

“My lady,” he greets her, and holds out a gloved hand to help her settle atop the rock beside him.

Sansa accepts with a smile of her own. She sits close, their shoulders and thighs touching, hands clasped together, fingers intertwined. He can feel the warmth from her body, radiating beneath the layers of her dress and cloak. Her cheeks are tinged pink. Theon’s gaze follows the line of that wintry blush down until it’s covered by her collar.

Something stirs within him, and he wants to be closer to her.

This is as alone as they’ve been since that first night, in the middle of the celebration feast after the White Walkers had fallen. Theon hasn’t kissed her properly since. Now that he has an opportunity to do so, they’re being watched by the eyes of her gods.

And her family, too. Theon glances at the red eyes of the heart tree, and wonders precisely who might be watching them now. No one who would be pleased to find them sitting so intimately together, he’s sure. But Sansa wants to be here, with him, else she would not have come. He’ll try to remember that, above all the rest.

She caresses his knuckles with her fingertips and asks, “How are your hands?”

“Better.” He looks down to watch as she continues to touch him. He loves looking at her hands on him, so tender and careful. “Maester Wolkan’s salve has done more than I could have hoped.”

Her thumb slips beneath the band of his glove; the leather of hers is cold on his skin. “May I see?”

“Sansa…” He doesn’t pull away, could never pull away from her. But what’s left of his fingers twitch. “They’re not a pretty sight. I don’t think they ever will be. Much like the rest of me.”

She holds his chin to make him look at her, to see the sincerity etched in every curve of her face, every line, every sun-dappled shadow. “You’re beautiful, Theon.”

“ _You’re_ beautiful.” There’s a lump in his throat as he looks her over, his gaze taking her in hungrily, like just looking at her could save him from starvation. “The most beautiful woman who’s ever looked at me.”

“Not the most beautiful you’ve ever looked at, though,” she teases him lightly.

“Ah, I only looked when I knew they were looking at me first.” He winks at her, because he knows it will make her smile. “What’s the point otherwise?”

That makes her laugh. It had been so long since he heard the sound, he holds it close every time it happens now.

He softens further the longer he looks. Her braid is coming undone, loose strands of red dancing on the breeze. There are snowflakes on her eyelashes, dusting her shoulders and melting into the hood of her cloak. She really is beautiful, and so much more peaceful here in the godswood with him than he’s seen her in days.

_He remembers other nights here as well. On the eve of her wedding, dressed all in whites and silvers, lanterns casting light and dark over her. His last night on this earth, the flicker and crack of flaming arrows, the sharp point of a spear…_

_There is no blood on the ground, but he can see it all still._

And then, in a blink, it’s all gone, and only Sansa sits in front of him.

“It’s hard to look at you, too, and believe that you’re real,” he almost-whispers, so as not to shatter the moment. “That being here with you is real.”

Her thumb strokes his face. He loves it when she does that. “How can I convince you?”

“You could kiss me.”

She smiles for him again. He loves it when she does that, too. “And you could remove your gloves for me. If you would,” she adds quickly. “I would never force you, Theon.”

“I know.”

Sansa would never ask him for anything he was not already willing to give her. He doesn’t want to frighten or disgust her, but he would not refuse her, either. And she is too kind of heart to be disgusted by what someone else did to him. She has scars of her own; he’s seen so many of them.

So Theon takes a deep, shuddering breath, and peels his gloves off, one by one. The cold bites at his chapped skin, but it feels refreshing, too.

Two of his fingers are gone, but the wounds healed over. His other hand remains intact, save the deep jagged cuts Ramsay had dug into him. The skin is dry and flushed red, sore and calloused and aching. The salve has helped to relieve the lingering pain, and the skin is healing, softening, but the recovery is not yet done.

Sansa says nothing of their current state, but strips off her own gloves so that she might touch him, with nothing in-between.

His breath shudders again when she does, when her soft palms run over all his crooked ridges. Her fingers play his like the strings of the high harp, memorizing every dip and edge and the sounds he makes when she strokes up the crease between his thumb and forefinger.

She feels like rose petals and the gentle lap of ocean waves. He is awed by the way that she touches him, like he’s worthy of such tenderness, of such affection — like he’s worthy of _her_.

He knows that he is not. But he wants her, anyway.

Slowly, Sansa cups his hands in hers and brings them to her lips. She plants kisses like flowers over his knuckles, his palms, his fingertips.

It’s better than the salve, Theon thinks, as he presses his forehead to hers, eyes screwed shut to stem the flow of grateful tears which threaten to fall.

“I love you,” he whispers, hoarse as ever, but nevertheless sure.

“I love you, too,” she promises.

And, with the eyes of the Old Gods at their backs, she lets him kiss her.

His lips cling to hers like the snowflakes in their hair; he kisses her slow and thorough and like he never means to stop. And she holds him close, like she never means to let him go.

_I won’t make it without you._

_You will._

But, this time, he’s not going anywhere without her.

**.**

Sansa shares with him the secret Jon swore them all not to — not to forsake his word, but to foster something better for the people of Westeros.

“I know you won’t tell.”

“Should you have?”

“No, perhaps not,” she admits. She looks uncomfortable, still not sure that she’s done the right thing, though sure enough that it was the only choice left to her. “But he’s so blinded by what he feels that he won’t accept who he is. He’s subjecting the country to suffering and ruin, and I won’t let our people die for the love of a Targaryen — or any Southron monarch. If a dragon’s meant to rule us, let it be one who would grant us freedom, too.”

She takes a breath, hand resting on the window ledge as if to steady herself. Theon closes the space between them to stand beside her. They look out across the grounds, melting blankets of snow and dead patches of earth, grey skies and the flap of ravens’ wings in the distance.

“Are you worried?” he asks her.

Sansa gives him a wry sort of grin. “Do I ever stop?”

“No.” He rubs the pad of his thumb up that crease between her brows, then leans in to press a kiss there. “But maybe you should.”

Another breath, a sigh as she moves snugly into his embrace. “Maybe when the war is over.”

_Will it ever be?_

Theon leaves a kiss upon the crown of her head. Her nose is cold against the side of his neck, and he wonders when spring will come to keep them warm.

**.**

There is still a wound through his middle, a deep angry scar that matches the rest which mar his body. The maester had given him a clean, if befuddled, bill of health. It had not managed to kill him true, but Sansa frets over his state all the same.

“You’re not marching South,” she tells him, with such a note of finality that there is no room for argument, should he want to make one. “No one should be, but I’m not letting you go with them.”

Theon has no wish to go. But… “What will Jon say?”

“He’s a commander of armies he won’t allow proper time to heal,” Sansa snaps, in a burst of impatience with her half-brother — for he is still family, no matter his father. “There’s no telling who else we’ll lose, or how many.

“You died once,” she continues. Now her voice cracks not with frustration, but worry. She blinks the rivers back from her eyes. “What if you didn’t come back again?”

Theon’s heard fear in her voice before. He’d failed to do something about it then. He won’t fall short now.

He cradles her face in his hands — just his hands, no gloves; he doesn’t wear them anymore, not when they’re alone. “I will _always_ come back to you.”

“You can’t promise me that.” Her fingers curl around his wrists, holding him to her. “It’s not up to us. You wanted us to be selfish together. So let me selfishly keep you here with me.”

She’s right, he knows. They’ve both lost enough to know that they’re only pawns in the games of the gods. And he’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t leave her side again. There is no reason for them to be apart anymore. They’ve _done_ that, only to come back together in the end.

He doesn’t want this to be the end. Sansa deserves a beginning, and he has to believe that he can give that to her.

But only if — “Then I’ll stay,” he murmurs. It’s a resolute, heated thing, and he takes her mouth to seal the vow. “I’ll stay.”

She relaxes, but he can taste the salt of her tears when she kisses him back. And he knows, he knows, that he couldn’t bear to leave her. Not like this.

He’ll be brave for her, the way that she needs him to be, and he will tell Jon himself. They have much to discuss besides.

**.**

Jon’s chambers are the same ones he kept as a boy, when he was only a bastard and Theon was only a ward. Robb had been the heir to the castle then. Sansa was promised to a prince, Arya played at swords, Bran dreamt of knighthood, and Rickon yapped with those direwolf pups as if he were one of them.

Theon would be a ward all over again, if it meant things could go back to the way they’d been.

 _Well_ — he fingers the direwolf pin at his breast — _most things, in any case._ If he could be the prince that Sansa was promised to.

She’s the reason he’s here, after all — at Jon’s door, at Winterfell, alive and becoming whole again, the reason he’s Theon Greyjoy when there was a time he thought that was lost to him forever. From his name to his place among her family, she’d given it all back to him. She saved him. He would spend the rest of his days proving to her that he’s worth it.

When he knocks, Jon calls for him to come in. Theon is thankful to find him alone, not keeping company with Daenerys as he’d worried. This will be no easy feat, but her presence surely would have complicated matters. Perhaps Jon will actually hear what he has to say, without bending to the queen’s will as soon as she opens her mouth.

He’s seen it happen a fair few times by now, and he was tired of it from the start.

“Theon,” Jon says by way of greeting. He stands in front of the fireplace, staring moodily into the flames as though they’ve done him some great offense. “It’s late. You should be getting your rest while you can.”

Thinking it best to simply get on with it, Theon holds his head high and tells him, “I’m not going to King’s Landing.”

Jon turns to look at him. “What?”

“I’m staying at Winterfell,” he reiterates, “with Sansa.”

“With Sansa?” Jon echoes. “Did she put you up to this, then? Is she that angry with me, that she won’t speak to me herself? She sends you in her place?”

“I told her I would.” Anger flashes through him. “Because what good would it do for her to speak to you, when you never seem to hear her?”

“Oh, I hear her,” Jon scoffs at him. “I’ve heard it from Arya, too. Sansa’s said plenty to me and I’ve heard every word.”

“Then why are you going?” Theon wants to know, though this isn’t what he’d come for. “Why are you leaving the North? Leaving her?”

“Sansa knows what my duties are.”

“ _Your duty_ is to your family.”

“Aye, and what would you know of that?” Jon shoots back. “You wanted forgiveness for the things you’d done, things I would have killed you for, but instead I gave you what you wanted. So don’t tell me what my duty is, Theon, while you stand there and tell me that you’re cowering away from the fight.”

“It’s not our fight!” _I do not cower, I will not back down, I am not Reek._ “I won’t pretend to know anything about the south or Cersei Lannister, but none of what you’re doing is for the sake of the North. Now that the White Walkers are gone, does it even matter to you what happens here? Or will you be fighting Daenerys Targaryen’s wars for the rest of your life?”

Jon’s eyes are depthless pools of black he’d likely drown Theon in, if he could. Just like when they were boys, squabbling in the training yard, both of them wanting all the same things, neither of them able to reach them.

A rightful place among the Starks. To be held first and foremost in Robb and Ned’s esteem. For the whispers and the taunts to stop following wherever they went. For a self-assurance that wasn’t predicated upon by survival instinct. Anything that would make them Starks in truth, and not just a couple of pretenders who spent their lonely hours cursing the gods for not making them more.

“She is our queen,” Jon grounds out between the rigid set of his teeth. “Her wars are ours as well. It would do you well to remember that, and Sansa, too.”

“You certainly won’t let us forget it, will you?”

For a moment, one he’s not sure will stretch out into forever but at least he has it now, he feels like his old self again. That grinning, careless boy whose self-assuredness was all put-upon bravado, but it had been enough for his heart to survive all his hurt and jealousy that Jon was more a Stark than he ever was. Jon had it in his blood. Jon’s father wanted him, and Theon’s had given him away.

But what does that matter, now? Ned Stark had brought his bastard to Winterfell, only for the boy to grow up and give it away.

And it never should have been his. The Starks of old will haunt these halls for every winter, spring, summer to come, bemoaning the tragedy that their ancestral seat had fallen into the hands of the last Targaryens.

Theon doesn’t want to blame Jon for all that’s happened. He hadn’t known and, even if he had, who is Theon to judge a man who struggles to know what his lineage means to him? Theon had done the same, and worse things still, in his quest to make something of his own name.

But he hates, _hates_ , that he’d all but groveled at Jon’s feet at Dragonstone, only for it to turn out that Jon didn’t deserve his pleas for forgiveness, for recognition.

Or perhaps what he hates most of all, is that Tyrion Lannister was right — he and Jon really have been too much alike all along.

“I did wrong by Robb, by all of you,” Theon goes on because now he can’t stop. He wonders if Jon will reach for his sword before he can finish. “I can’t be forgiven for it. I’ll never forgive myself. But I would do right by Sansa now. I will keep her faith and her counsel and anything else she would entrust to me. I —”

He stumbles then. Jon looks very much like he wants to kill him. But he won’t, just as he hadn’t on the shores of Dragonstone.

“I want to marry her,” Theon says, when he finds that he cannot stop entirely. Why should he? “And a husband should keep to his wife, in all things.”

“And you want my blessing, is that it?” Jon’s hand clenches at his side.

He doesn’t want anything, aside from her. Jon can take it or leave it so far as he’s concerned. If Sansa would have him, then that is all Theon needs to give it to her.

His voice starts to shake, his resolve starts to crumble, but he will not stop. There’s been too much on the tip of his tongue for him to swallow it now.

“You said — _you said_ that what I did for her, that’s why you didn’t kill me. And I thought you were a good man, I said it, right to you. But now, I don’t know anymore, Jon. You spared my life for what I did for Sansa, and now… Now I think I ought to take yours, for all you’ve done to her.”

It’s a bold thing to say. A stupid thing. Thoughtless, careless, best left to himself.

But Theon is _tired_ of keeping things to himself, whatever they might cost him.

Jon scrubs a hand over his face, as if he could dispel his fatigue in that one motion. “You bent the knee long before I did.”

“I did what Yara asked of me, because it’s what we needed to do to take back the Iron Islands,” Theon defends himself. “The Dragon Queen has my sword, but it’s my sister — what’s left of my family — who has my loyalty. Who has yours?”

“Don’t talk to me of loyalty, Theon Greyjoy,” Jon bites out.

Theon is well-shot of hearing such things from him. Neither of them are fit to hold one another’s crimes against the other.

“You gave up the North. You gave away her home — _your_ home, _ours_.” His voice breaks again, but he does not. “You didn’t see her with Ramsay. I did, I was there, I let it happen. Now you’re letting it happen, too. You were right when you said you don’t always do the right thing. _This_ isn’t right. Sansa deserves better than this.”

“And you are, then?”

“No,” he says, and means it. There’s a hatred of himself that’s cut deep and eternal; all he can do is love her enough to keep the rest buried. “But I want to be. I want to _try_ — I’ll spend the rest of my life trying for her.”

Jon has nothing to say to that, or at least nothing worth saying. He looks back to the fire in its grate.

“It’s not my decision who the Lady of Winterfell marries. She’ll be the Wardenness of the North by the end of this, for all that matters, so Daenerys might have something to say about it.”

“And Sansa?”

“Daenerys is her queen, and yours, too,” Jon reminds him. It’s all that Jon seems to remind anyone of these days.

_It’s not our choice to make, then._

Still, Theon ventures for any sign of approval that might make this easier. He cannot give Sansa heirs, so he must try for something else. “A marriage alliance between the North and the Iron Islands would be favorable.”

Jon will not look at him. “Go on and tell Daenerys that, then.”

That should be the end of it. Yet Theon cannot stop arguing with him, imploring him to stand up and fight for something that matters — something more than who sits on the Iron Throne that Theon’s never understood, never cared about. It’s done more than enough harm by now. Why should they continue to allow it to determine every move they make?

“Do you not care at all what happens here?” he asks again, for Jon had not answered him the first time. “What do you intend to do? Go south and never look back? Leave Sansa and Arya and Bran to their fate while you take King’s Landing, as if that’s something you actually want?”

“Don’t tell me what I want.”

“Tell _me_ , then,” Theon all but begs him, and hates him all the more for it. Robb would not want this of either of them, not when what’s left of their family is on the line, and Robb’s memory is the strongest bond between them. “Tell me at what cost you would stop and remember who you are, the same way you told me to remember. I won’t pretend that all my sins are behind me, but when I came back at least I did it right. When I knew my sister was safe and where she ought to be, I came back to Winterfell. I pledged myself _to_ _Winterfell_. What have you done?”

That gets Jon’s full attention. He turns to face him, to argue, “I’ve stood by my oath —”

“To who? How many oaths will you break, just to keep the one you made to Daenerys Targaryen?” he challenges. “Would you choose her over your homeland, your family, truly?”

“You don’t know anything about my family,” Jon says darkly, “or what I’ve done for them.”

“You broke their hearts, that’s what you did,” Theon spits with as much venom as he can, with all the disdain that’s left to him, because he doesn’t care what he knows when it comes to Jon Snow now. “You had a duty to them and you’ve failed.”

He is miles away when he says by way of explanation — for it is not justification at all — “Love is the death of duty.”

 _What a foolish thing to say._ Theon doesn’t give a damn who Jon loves, if this is how it ends.

“Maybe you should have loved your family over her, then.” Theon prepares to leave. There was no point in this endeavor. “You’re not the man I thought you were.”

His answering sigh is heavy, tired, defeated — all manner of things from which they’ve all suffered, but for the better part of his life Theon thought Jon to be immune to the consequences. If he does it all for honour, isn’t that enough to help him sleep at night?

But the give of his shoulders does not speak of a man who sleeps any more than Theon does.

“I’m not the man I thought I was, either.”

Theon supposes he should feel sorry for him, but he can’t muster the pity. He is being cruel, he knows, but there’s something crackling deep in his gut, unbidden, untameable — _Is this what happens_ , he wonders, _when you come back from the dead?_

Jon would know better than anyone else, but when Theon looks at him, all he sees is exhaustion. They’re all tired — tired of fighting, of forging alliances with the lesser of two evils, of negotiating their lives if they manage to come out of this war without losing them.

There is no sense in asking him for anything.

At the door, Theon pauses, unable to keep himself from doing it. For Sansa or Robb’s ghost or all of the North or any number of reasons, he wants Jon to understand. To remember.

“Your family still has faith in you. No matter what you do, all they’ve done is to keep you safe.” The door creaks when Theon pushes it open. “Remember that, the next time you undermine Sansa for the sake of someone else.”

Jon’s gone back to the fire. He’s had his fill of the things Theon’s had to say to him. “Sansa can take care of herself. She’s proven that a time or two.”

“It’s time someone else stepped in to take care of her. To protect her.” He would say more, but what else is left? “I thought it would be you.”

_Go north. Only north. Jon is Lord Commander at Castle Black. He’ll help you._

“So did I.”

Theon lingers in the doorway. “What changed?”

Jon sighs, weary as the rest of him. “Everything.”

His answer means next to nothing, and yet tells Theon all he needs to know.

He is not given leave for the things he asked for, but Theon is going to take them all the same. He swore no sacred oaths to Jon Snow, but he’s promised Sansa the world, as best as he can give it. And so he will stand by her side through this war, and he will marry her when it’s all done.

**.**

It’s been a long time since he’s known fury. His anger had been stripped away from him, leaving behind nothing but fear and crippling anxiety and an inability to feel anything that didn’t hurt him.

But his argument with Jon, one barb after the next, has Theon sparking with an indignation bordering on a rage that only festers with every step he takes.

His is tired of asking permission, sick to _death_ of waiting on the whims of others more powerful than he. He was a stupid, selfish boy in the past, it’s true. He’d been cruel and atrocious and he hates himself and he doesn’t deserve a god damn thing that he wants.

But Sansa wants him. She loves him. Somehow, unspeakably, it is a miracle far beyond whatever had brought him back to life.

Perhaps this is what the Drowned God meant when he’d said Theon wasn’t his. Because he belongs to Sansa; he’d even gone so far as to confess it all to her. No god had taken him to his grave, for it had been Sansa who’d given him life again to start. He wouldn’t have wanted it back, had it not been for her.

_Your name is Theon Greyjoy._

He cannot shake her voice in his head, ringing loud and true, overtaking the echo of his determined gait through the corridors as he makes his way to her. The hour’s grown late, but this will not wait ‘til the morning. _He_ will not wait.

She unbars the door as soon as he knocks on it, as soon as he whispers his name into the wood.

“Is everything alright?” she asks, tones all hushed and concerned.

_No._

_Yes._

_It will be._

Theon looks at her, drinks her in the same way he had the day he came back and all the days since. Her hair is plaited for bed, falling thick and a little unruly over one shoulder. Her dressing gown is crooked, like she’d just tossed it on before she hastened to answer his knock, and her feet are bare.

“I wanted to see you.”

Never breaking their gaze, he shuts the door behind him. It’s a loud clap of sound in an otherwise vacant hallway, but they’re alone and anything else ceases to matter. Even his anger fades, bit by bit, every second that he is with her.

Sansa’s confusion has yet to ebb. There’s that line between her brows, the one he knows so well, the one he’ll do anything and everything to soothe away. “What for? Theon —”

“There’s nothing to worry about.” He drops his gloves onto her dressing table, so that he can smooth his hands down her face with no disruption. “I just — want you.”

He kisses her before she can register what he means, though he’ll stop if she wants nothing of it. He’ll always stop. But she kisses him back, and it’s all hot and searing and needful and she _doesn’t_ want him to stop it.

He must stop to breathe, though, shallow and harsh. The cool air of her chambers pricks at his throat, but there is a fire deep within that flares and licks at every corner of his body that it reaches.

Sansa’s eyes flutter open, dark and wondering. “What did you say?”

“That I want you,” he repeats. He walks her backwards, away from the crackling fire in its grate and towards the shadows that cover her bed, slowly, in case she wants to tell him no. “Is that alright?”

She doesn’t appear to follow his words, though she follows his steps and allows him to lead her across the room. “What is it you want from me?”

“No, not _from_ you,” he clarifies with a smile to reassure her. “Just you.”

“Is there something that I can… do… for you?” Her gaze drops to the front of his trousers, before hastily returning to his face like she hadn’t meant to do that.

Theon doesn’t mind. He might have, before, but it’s not _before_ anymore; it is simply _now_. He knows what he’s lost, and he knows what among those many things is important. What’s important right now is that he can love Sansa regardless.

“Not that, love.” He is careful not to tread on her toes when they stop abruptly, when the backs of her knees hit the edge of the mattress. “There’s something _I_ want to do for you.”

“What?”

“To show you what I feel for you” — he strokes her cheek — “how much I love you” — he kisses across her jaw to whisper in her ear — “how devoted I am to serving you.”

“Theon…” She knows what he has been through, knows that he had served so long under the thumb of someone cruel. She ruffles a comforting hand through his hair. “You don’t have to.”

“I do this because I want to, I promise.” He drags the tip of his nose along the line of hers. “If you’ll have me.”

Her breath tickles his lips. It makes him want to kiss her again, so he does, and she sighs a _yes_ into his mouth. Another thing for which he will be eternally grateful to her.

His hand hovers near her shoulder. “May I, my lady?”

The formality puts her at ease, expels a breathy little laugh from betwixt her lips. She nods.

Slowly — he does it all slowly, gently — he pushes the dressing gown from her shoulders. He loosens the ties of her shift but does not remove it; she can keep it on if she likes, he’ll leave that up to her. He unbinds her hair, working his fingers through the braid until her hair falls in soft waves, loose and free and ready for him to run his hands through it. He does so, marveling at its colour and softness, in the slight curl of the ends that fall down to her waist.

She’s soft and smells of something clean, something sweet, like rose petals floating atop hot water, fragrant and warm. Every pass of his hands through her hair is another step away from the bubbling fury that had led him here. He cannot be displeased when she’s standing right in front of him.

“Would you sit for me, please?”

She does, perching herself demurely at the edge of the bed. Her nerves are apparent in the way she clutches at the furs, but she says nothing of them, just waits to see what Theon means to do next.

He strips out of his jerkin, and tugs the tunic from over top his head. Sansa is allowing him to see her, she’s giving him pieces of herself she’d meant to keep close and locked away for the rest of her days. The least he can do in exchange is to show her all of his scars, too. She is the only person he could imagine sharing this with. They’ve shared so much already, so many terrible things — let them have this moment of peace, too.

Her tongue peeks out to swipe at her bottom lip. He chases the movement with a slow stroke of his thumb.

Now it is Sansa’s hands which ghost, unsure, along his sides when she asks, “Can I?”

Theon nods, not trusting himself to speak as he trembles at the barest touch of her fingertips. He sucks in a breath when her hands map his chest, trace his scars, follow the lines of each and every one from start to end.

She stops at one near the middle, erring a bit towards his left hip where the Night King had struck. Dark and star-shaped, a reminder that he’d been dead and gone until he wasn’t, a reminder of what they almost never had together.

Sansa holds him steady by the hips when she presses a kiss there. He feels a tear or two on his skin before she wipes them away.

“I love you,” she says, murmuring the words in which he’s found salvation.

 _It’s no wonder the Drowned God wouldn’t have me_ , he thinks as he looks at her. _I couldn’t bring myself to worship anyone but her._

As though to prove it, he lowers himself to his knees in front of her, and coaxes hers apart so he might sit between them. His eyes scan her face, tucking away the memory of dark indigo eyes and faded firelight upon her skin. They will have more nights like this, every night if that’s what she wants, but he wants dearly to remember their first.

“I love you,” he returns in kind. “Let me show you.”

Ever slowly still, he keeps his hands on her legs, rubbing circles above her knees so as not to overwhelm or frighten her. He takes deep, measured breaths to keep himself calm, to hold back and keep himself present. Memories of their time with Ramsay Bolton had faded somewhat in his death, but he won’t forget completely, and Sansa doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting at all. He’ll do all that he can to make it go away, for however short a time he is able.

 _Give us this peace_ , he prays, before he sets about thinking of her and nothing else.

He kisses her neck languidly, taking all the time he’d like to explore the graceful curve of it and the smooth skin beneath her jaw. He feels her pulse quicken under the press of his mouth, the flick of his tongue. He does not use his teeth on her, for fear of making her hurt.

Outside, the wind whistles through the walkways and the bare branches of the trees, but here the room is quiet. Nothing but the pop of the fire and their laboured breathing as Theon kisses her, and then the whispered words he pants into her ear — “Have you ever known pleasure, Sansa?”

He had, once, several times over, in a lifetime that no longer feels like his own. In retrospect, a part of him hopes that he’d given it, too. He hadn’t cared back then, but now…

He wants to give that to Sansa, if she wants it, too. He can’t do things the way that he used to, but all the same he can give her this — he can love her, in so many ways, in every way he knows how.

In response, she shakes her head. He’d known that would be her answer, for who had ever loved her as they should have? As she deserves?

 _No one._ But he will.

“Lie back for me, love.” He quirks a brow, eyes hopeful. “Unless you want to watch?”

“What do you want me to do?” she repeats her earlier question, and this time Theon has an answer for her.

“Watch me.” He runs eager hands higher up on her thighs. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s wanted this much, but he wants her desperately. “See _how much_ I love you. Just as you should be.”

Theon slips his fingertips beneath the hem of her shift, just there, just a little bit, and then pauses as he awaits her permission. “Do you trust me, Sansa?”

“Yes.” Her voice quavers, though he thinks it might be anticipation more than anything else. Her cheeks are pink and eyes dark like the hot springs at midnight. “More than anything. I trust you with me, Theon.”

It could break his heart and mend it all at once. She could end him and breathe life back into his lungs in one fell swoop. She could do anything she wants, everything imaginable, and he will always come crawling back to her — not as a servant or a prisoner or any of the things he had once been, but as a lover wholly devoted to her because it’s what he _wants_. She’d given desire back to him, this pure and selfish thing he has the freedom to feel, and he wants to let her have it, too.

When her hand moves through his hair, he reaches up to encourage her, to tighten her fingers in his curls.

“Hold on to me,” he says, and rucks up her shift to bury his head between her legs.

He feels her sharp intake of breath, feels the slight scratch of her nails through the thick waves of his hair down to his scalp, when he parts his lips over her smallclothes. She’s warm but not yet wet for him — _almost_ , he can taste it through the finely-stitched silk that acts as a barrier between her cunt and his tongue. Almost, but not quite.

It’s been so long since Theon’s done anything of the sort, ages since he’s wanted to. He hardly remembers what it is to want a woman, to bring her to peak — though he’d never much cared about that in the past, only if it would satiate his own sense of self-importance. Making a girl come had never been something he bothered himself with for her pleasure alone. It was just something he’d do from time to time, just to prove that he could, so he could claim that there was no better man than him.

None of that matters now. Now, he wants Sansa — wants to make her come apart under the worshipful glide and press of his tongue, the crook of his fingers, the reverberation of his groans into her cunt. And he wants it not for himself, but for _her_ , so that she’ll know what it means to be loved without any motive otherwise. He wants to be a better man, the best of them, for her alone.

She hasn’t had anything of her own in so long, Theon knows. He licks up the seam of her underthings, breathes hot and heavy against her. _Let her have me._

When she squirms beneath the insistent press of his mouth, Theon hooks his forefingers into her smallclothes and yanks them down to her ankles and over her feet, out of the way.

He glides his hand up her calf and tells her, “Get your legs around my shoulders, love.”

She does not hesitate to comply, and so he dives back into the vee of her thighs and puts his mouth on her with nothing left to stop him.

She tastes as sweet here as her lips do. There is a tang that makes him think of lemons, a musk that reminds him of the beach at dawn when a storm’s rolling in. Most of all, though, she tastes like _Sansa_ , and she tastes like she wants him.

And so he gives himself over completely, in a way he never has in any lifetime before. He is hers, and if the gods will grant him just one more kindness, then she will be his, too.

He hooks one arm around her thigh, tugging her closer as he continues to work at her with his mouth. When he flicks his tongue over her clit, she moans — high and sharp, and she bends over him, hair cascading down his naked back. The feather-softness of it across his spine makes him tremble anew, makes him groan like some sort of beast into her cunt and lick her more purposefully.

Up and down he swirls his tongue, and then pushes it inside of her. She gasps and her fingernails dig half-moons into his shoulder, his lower back, but it doesn’t make him squirm in that painful way he used to know. It is Sansa and it is sweet, the most merciful thing he’s ever felt at another’s hands.

He pulls back, gasping in air that’s tinged with her arousal, and she mewls like some lovelorn alley cat. But he’s not finished with her, not nearly.

“I want to put my fingers inside of you, too.” He sucks kisses onto her inner thighs, where the scars are bright white and he wants to calm whatever hurt might still beat there. “Can I?”

 _“Yes,”_ she half-sobs with want. Her lips are on the back of his neck, soft and dry, breath ragged and hotter than the fire dwindling down behind them. “ _Yes_ , please, Theon, I need you.”

His heart clenches, and he cannot deny her. Could never imagine a time in which he would.

He finds her clit again, as his hand sweeps over her thigh and he slips a finger into her tight, wet heat. Her legs clench around him, muscles tense and begging for a release that he’s begging to give her just as much.

Another finger joins the first. He thrusts them gently, in time with the rhythm of his tongue to match the tempo and suit her needs. He laps at her cunt, fervent and hungry, like he’s been starving for her. All that he does now is intent, an impassioned drive to fulfill the need he’s instilled within her. Gone is the slow tease of his lips, the patient touch of his hands — it’s all become fast and purposeful.

Theon sits up taller on his aching knees, his body throbbing not only from the cold stone floor, but with wanting her. He holds tight to her thighs as his mouth continues loving her. Sansa falls back against the furs but her hands stay in his hair, her back arching with every sweep of his tongue, every twitch of his fingers inside of her.

 _“Sansa…”_ He moans her name, gruff and needy. His eyes flash up to watch her, fluttering lashes, hitching chest, pink skin. “Come for me. _Please_ , love, let go for me.”

When she does, it’s with a gasp, sharp as the point of a blade, high like birdsong when dawn breaks. Her body trembles beneath his hands and he holds her ‘til it stops, licking her through the aftershocks, rubbing her legs as they tense and release with her peak. She cries out his name and then repeats it, soft and over and over again, like he’s the only prayer that’s ever been answered.

He kisses her thighs, her hips, up the line of her stomach to the mad beat of her heart. Her arms come around him as he hovers over her, bringing him in so that her heart thrums against his chest and his against hers.

And he knows that she is the only thing he’s ever prayed for that he’s been given, too.

**.**

She’s removed her shift for him, lying naked and pressed against him beneath the warmth of the furs. Scars crisscross her body, but he tells her that she is beautiful because that hasn’t changed. No one could take that from her, not from her skin nor her heart.

He’s left his trousers on, but she makes no comment about it. He’ll show her all of himself one day, and she seems to understand that without him telling her.

Still, her skin is hot against his, a comfort for which he’d hardly dared hope for in times long since past. The chambers have grown dark, the fire reduced to nothing but sparks of bright orange embers. It smells of woodsmoke and rose petals and the faint tinge of sweat. Theon nuzzles into her neck to breathe it in deep.

“I can’t give you children,” he rasps, throat dry from nerves and because it always seems to be, ever since he’d come back. He massages her lower back and she snuggles nearer to him. “I know how much you wanted boys and girls of your own.”

“I’ve lost count of how many wars we’ve been fighting. The orphanage in Wintertown is fit to burst,” she says. She toys with the curls at the nape of his neck. “There are so many children in want of mothers and fathers. We can help them, if you’d like to.”

Hope and gratitude both swell in his chest. He would bring her closer if he could, if he could wrap her up into his body and keep her with him always; he’d crawl into her bones if he could. The desire is so all-encompassing, it manifests in an itch so deep he cannot scratch it, a tingle that ignites his nerves and sparks incessantly at the ends, cannot be contained nor controlled and so he asks her now, in the dark and the quiet, wind whistling through the cracks in the stone walls —

“You’ll marry me?”

He does not even have the time to hold his breath, for she answers straightaway.

“Of course I will.” She says it like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

Maybe, he thinks, as he brushes the hair from her face to capture her lips in another ardent, deep and joyous kiss, it is.

**.**

There is no time for a wedding before their armies march south. There is no further debate of whether Theon will go or not. He stays behind, and he shares Sansa’s bed as a husband would. Who is left to stop them? What does it matter now, when the North’s future hangs so precariously upon what happens in the capital?

He shouldn’t. They shouldn’t.

_Be selfish with me, please._

But he loves her, and that means more than the rules which such a broken country would impose upon them.

**.**

Ravens come from Dragonstone:

The capital did not surrender, Missandei is dead, and Daenerys inconsolable.

Lord Varys has been executed as a traitor.

Jon and Tyrion let the man burn, because it is what Daenerys decreed. Theon wonders if Jon would have let him burn, too, if she’d ordered it done. He wonders if it will come to pass once this is all through.

He looks to Sansa and knows that she’d be worth it, that he would die for her. Death is not nearly so bad as all he’s endured, but the thought of leaving her alone in this world…

He can only hope that the Drowned God might reject him again.

Then, from King’s Landing:

The city has fallen. She’s burned it all.

Tyion Lannister defies her on the smoldering steps of the Red Keep.

She is dead at Jon’s hands.

Both men have been taken prisoner by the Unsullied.

“As if they’ve any right.” Sansa tosses the letter away from her in disgust, in a finely-controlled fury. “They’re an army of sellswords, for gods’ sake. Their loyalty is bought.”

“Daenerys Targaryen didn’t buy them,” Bran points out. It is not a commendation, but a matter of fact, as he says everything these days. “She offered them freedom.”

Sansa snorts derisively, yet ever the lady. “Yes, because she didn’t have any gold. We’ve all heard the stories of her great conquests, and what have they done for anyone now? Rumours from Slaver’s Bay say that the masters have taken back their power, though their cities are all in more chaotic disrepair than even Westeros.”

“The rumours are true,” Bran says, simple and succinct as always.

Theon doesn’t know why, but that makes him chuckle. Perhaps it’s that all this news has been so overwhelming and impossible to handle. It’s too much tragedy on the cusp of hope, of all these wars coming finally, mercifully, to an end, only to be thwarted by sellswords who don’t belong in Westeros to begin with. Who are they to take prisoners, to incite further bloodshed? And yet they’ve done just that.

He schools his expression into a serious one when Sansa glares at him, but then her face softens. She stops her pacing to stand between where he and Bran sit, and places a hand on his shoulder. Theon’s own comes up to cover hers.

“I never wanted to go back there,” Sansa says, more to herself than either of them. Theon squeezes her fingers.

“We must.” There is a sigh in Bran’s voice now, resigned, but not entirely taken aback by any of this.

Arya is not there to say anything. She is in King’s Landing already, her letter arriving a full day before Grey Worm’s. They’ve been making preparations to leave ever since. Not all of their troops had gone south to take what Daenerys Targaryen claimed as her own, but they will march now to recover what belongs to the Starks.

This time, Sansa will not stay behind. She will lead their army to save her family, the way no one had come for her so many years ago.

With her own sigh, Sansa’s shoulders slump. “I know.”

Later, Theon repeats those words to her, murmurs them into her hair in the middle of the night. They’re meant to rest for their journey south on the morrow, but Sansa can’t sleep and neither can he.

“I never wanted to go back.” Her sobs are hushed and held back, and he knows that she hates the way her body shudders with them.

“I know.” He rubs soothing hands over her back, but still she trembles. “Shh. My love, I know.”

He presses his lips wherever he can reach without disentangling from her. Her neck, her cheek, her temple. He sucks her earlobe between his teeth and mutters words of comfort, promises to keep her safe, to do all it takes to do right by her.

_I would have taken you all the way to the Wall. I would have died to get you there._

He will not die now, not when she needs him most. But he will go with her, ride south beside her. She doesn’t have to do this alone anymore.

“I’m here,” Theon assures her. What’s left of his fingers tangle in the ends of her hair. “And I’m not going anywhere, not unless it’s with you.”

Another sob escapes, but she kisses him until it’s gone.

**.**

Her tears are long since dried. She looks as though she’s never shed a single one.

**.**

The sun beats down, relentlessly hot despite the canopy which shields them from it. The meeting at the Dragonpit had been tense, more so even than the last time Theon had been there, because they’re so close to freedom, to peace, and one wrong move could shatter it all.

But now, Bran is king. The Iron Throne has been replaced by a humble boy in a wheelchair, a man predisposed to an objective perspective, who has a kind heart underneath all that’s befallen him. It is the best they could have hoped for. There are no wrong moves left to make.

As the council of the kingdoms — just six of them now — adjourns, Yara approaches him. They had not had the chance to speak beforehand, though she had not appeared surprised to find him standing at Sansa’s back.

Without so much as a hello, for his sister had never been one for pleasantries, Yara says, “We pledged to fight for Daenerys Targaryen.”

Jon has not quite been pardoned, but he has not been sentenced to death, either. Theon had squirmed uncomfortably as his sister and Sansa’s very nearly came to blows, but he had not protested the compromise.

“We did,” he agrees. His eyes find Sansa, who has been drawn into conversation with Lord Royce and her cousin Robin. “But then I went and pledged to someone else.”

Yara follows his gaze. She snorts, shakes her heard, but fails to hide a smile — exasperated, yes, but a smile nonetheless. “I don’t know how you manage to think with your cock when you haven’t even got one anymore.”

His answering grin is wry but, again, a grin all the same. “I’ve found better ways of thinking.”

“Your heart’s a useless thing.”

“It wasn’t useless when I came back for you,” he reminds her. “Or when I fought for Winterfell, for Bran.”

Yara says nothing to that at first. But then she wants to know, “Tell me, Theon. Did you return North for the Stark boy, or is it their queen who’s been on your mind?”

_I want to fight for Winterfell, Lady Sansa. If you’ll have me._

_I belong to you._

“It was for all of them,” he says, for it’s the truth. He loves her with everything that he is, but it had started with the love he bore her family a lifetime ago. “I owe the Starks a debt I can never repay, no matter what they tell me otherwise. I returned for them all, but I would stay for her.”

“You don’t need my permission. The Iron Islands fared fine without you before. I daresay I’ll make a suitable kingdom of them on my own, and then I’ll be petitioning our boy king for independence.” Yara gives him a sidelong look. “You’ll help me with that, won’t you?”

“When you’re ready.”

“Then I’m happy for you, little brother.” She claps a hand on his back. “I hope Winterfell can finally feel like home to you.”

 _A hostage, a ward, a usurper, a prisoner, a warrior._ Truly, Theon has done it all for the keep in the North. He is not proud of most of it, but he’s been given leave to make amends. Perhaps one day Yara will be right, and the castle will be home in his heart.

His eyes find Sansa again, and he thinks he may be halfway there already.

**.**

The docks are bustling with activity, waves lapping merrily upon the shore and the warm breeze whipping through his hair. Sansa, Bran, and Arya are making their way to the dock upon which Theon stands waiting for them, but Jon reaches him first.

His hair is cut, face shaven, Stark colours restored. He looks as though he hasn’t been a prisoner here for weeks, but there is a haunted look in his eye that speaks to all the years he’s spent following orders above his heart. Theon wouldn’t begin to guess what the man’s heart wants now or what it ever did. All he knows that, if it truly is like his, then Jon’s been torn apart by conflict and his own self-doubt.

Theon might never have pity for him, but he at least understands.

Jon’s eyes flick from Theon to his family, still a ways off, and back again. “You’ll take care of her?”

“I will.” He tilts his head. “But I think you knew the answer to that already.”

There is a smile for that, fleeting, but Jon Snow had never been much for joy; fleeting was always the best he could do.

“I do love her. All of them,” he asserts. “Even if you don’t believe me.”

It’s not Theon’s place to believe him or not. It doesn’t much matter anymore. So he keeps his eyes and voice steady, for it’s as much strength as he’s been able to recover since his days of not believing in anything at all, and he says, “I believe you did the right thing.”

“Aye, the right thing…” Jon almost laughs. He doesn’t quite manage it, just looks off into the distance as if the horizon might have the answer. “I don’t know what that is, really. Do you?”

No. He doesn’t. That’s always been the trouble, hasn’t it?

“No,” he admits aloud. “But I believe it all the same.”

There’s nothing else to be said after that. Theon doesn’t know if they’ve finally brokered a peace between them but, then, perhaps that was never what they were meant to do. Too much alike, too often at odds… There was always something inherently _other_ about them both, that they could never find common ground. They grasp one another’s forearms in a shake, in farewell, but there is nothing else besides that — and even then, it may only be Robb’s ghost between them that insists upon it.

The boards of the dock creak when the Starks come upon them. All three look as though their hearts are cracking in their chests. Theon wishes dearly that there was something he could do, and he knows how it pains Jon, too.

They have all the time in the world now, yet somehow not enough to regain all that they’ve lost. The world is tearing them apart again.

Wars or not, Westeros is a cruel place in which to love.

Theon stands at the end of the dock, to give them privacy as they say their goodbyes. Their voices carry on the sea breeze but he doesn’t catch a word of it, nor does he try. He only watches, hands clasped behind his back, as Jon takes them all, one by one, into his arms. Theon hopes for their sake that this will not be the last time.

He watches as Jon takes his leave, as the wind comes in again, ruffling Bran’s hair, whistling through Arya’s, and snapping Sansa’s skirts ‘round her ankles, and he thinks that they all deserve more than the gods have found fit to grant them.

**.**

The halls of Winterfell are not as full as they once were.

Ned, Catelyn, Robb, Rickon, they’re all long gone. Nothing but memories, of stern talks and grand speeches and careless laughter, rushing footsteps as the boys run with their wolves. Jon Snow has returned to the Wall — or beyond it, more like, as there is no need for a Night’s Watch now. Bran reigns as King in the South, and Arya has gone to find adventure, to find herself, somewhere she can be Arya Stark without it actually mattering what her name is.

Sansa bid Brienne stay in King’s Landing, to protect Bran as the woman had protected her. _To give him a piece of home_ , she’d told Theon, and he hopes that he can be home to her.

_When the snow falls and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives._

“You shouldn’t have to be alone,” he says, sorry for all she’s had to sacrifice and desperate for her to have something to show for it.

“I’m not alone, Theon.” She gives him a smile and touches the direwolf pin she’d bequeathed to him, the favour that he wears always, dutifully, at his heart. “I have you.”

**.**

It is the first night they’ve had to themselves since their return, the first chance they’ve had to talk with no one but each other to hear. There is much to discuss, but not much else to think about, at least not tonight.

Theon feels at peace for the first time in years, in lifetimes, laying curled up in bed with her. His mind is quiet, the rush of water in his ears no longer so deafening. There is only the drip of melting snow from their window panes, the crackle of the fire in its grate, and the steady sound of Sansa’s breathing next to him.

He is at ease, though he knows she still has her concerns. So he strokes her hair and talks her through them.

_The Starks die when we go south. We don’t belong there._

“Are you worried for Bran?” he asks.

“Now?” Sansa wraps an arm around his middle and tugs him against her. “No. Our enemies have fallen, Lannister, Targaryen, Bolton… they’re all gone now. Except for Tyrion, but he’s no threat to Bran or any of us without Cersei or Joffrey or Tywin Lannister pulling the strings.”

Theon does not miss the way that she does not mark Jon as a Targaryen. To them, he’ll always be a Stark. He hopes that, regardless of the animosity between them, Jon knows that.

“We’ll always have enemies, I suppose,” Sansa continues, “but who would wish ill upon a boy like him? Bran is intelligent and kind, he always has been. I’m sure he still is, underneath it all. He’s a just man. It’s his nature, whatever name he goes by now.”

“He’s still there, Sansa,” Theon reassures her honestly. He wouldn’t say so otherwise. “He may call himself the Three-Eyed Raven, but he’s still Bran. I can see him.”

“I know. It’s just…” She sighs, a little sad. “It’s not the life I would have chosen for us.”

He kisses her hair. “What would you have chosen?”

“All of us, together, at Winterfell. A foolish dream, I know.” She laughs now, still a little sad but not irreparably so. “Even in our best of days it wouldn’t have been allowed. We’d have been married off and moved about, to King’s Landing or the Westerlands or some other corner of the North away from here. I know that. Now, at least, there’s more of a choice in the matter.”

Yes, there was some, Theon thinks. Bran’s mindset compelled him to take on the responsibility of the crown and Arya had made her own path, as she’d always wanted. But…

“Would you pardon Jon, then?” Theon asks her. “Have him come home?”

“I would, if he wanted it. A few moons on and I doubt the news would so much as reach Grey Worm and the rest at all.”

“But?” he prompts her when she stalls.

“But Bran didn’t exile him for compromise alone. He knew it was what Jon wanted — to be free, for once unburdened by name and duty and whatever else that’s been holding to him all this time.”

Sansa sighs again, a rush of breath that tickles Theon’s throat. It stirs him, but he’ll wait to shove his hand up her nightdress until she’s finished talking. He wants her to say all that’s been on her mind since their return, and then he wants to spend the rest of the night loving her worries away.

“Jon was always so preoccupied with what it meant to be a Stark, only to learn he’d been a Targaryen as well,” she goes on, and Theon nods along. “Maybe that was the real problem. It wasn’t about love. We never talked about what he felt, really, it’s like he couldn’t figure that out himself. It was just duties he could no longer carry. He was so beholden by name and title and reputation, when I think all he ever wanted was to be Jon Snow, and to feel like that was enough.”

_It always seemed that there was an impossible choice I had to make. Stark or Greyjoy._

“I know the feeling,” Theon replies.

“I know you do.” Sansa caresses his cheek. “Have I given that to you at all?”

He turns his head to kiss her fingers. “You have. And Bran gave that same chance to Jon, I take it?”

“He did.” The corners of Sansa’s lips quirk, Theon can see it in the light of the fire that dances over their bed. “And I wouldn’t dream of taking it away. I’m sure we’ll see him again, just as I’m sure that Arya will come home, when she’s ready. After she finds what’s west of Westeros” — now her grin widens, and a light far apart from the fire sparkles in her eye — “and perhaps finds what’s waiting for her at Storm’s End, too.”

“Oh?” Theon lifts an eyebrow, intrigued. “The Baratheon boy?”

She drops her voice to a low, conspiratorial whisper; it’s as if they’re playing some  
sort of game. “I think they’re in love.”

Theon beams at her, chuckles as he runs a fingertip down her nose. “Such a romantic you are.”

She smiles back, more genuine than forlorn now. She quite likes the idea of her sister falling in love. Theon is glad that she’s maintained that romanticism he’s teased her about; it’s a pocket of innocence, of happier times, and he finds himself crossing his fingers for luck that she’s onto something here.

“For now, let them be as they wish,” Sansa says, more content with every thought she shares with him. Her fingertips dance up his spine and he feels her giggle when he shivers. “Arya and Jon were always the same, in their own special way. They can do what they want for the first time in so many years. Let Arya run wild and let Jon be with the Free Folk. Let him live without worrying that he’s not doing the right thing.”

“He didn’t always, before the end.”

“No, I don’t suppose he did.”

They fall silent for a moment, both of them thinking of how it might all have gone differently. But it is what it is now, and they’ll have to accept it. Theon kisses her hair again and Sansa presses her lips to his heartbeat.

“You understand him well, though.”

Sansa shakes her head. “He never wanted to be understood. Jon would never actually come out and say what he wanted — one of the places where he and Arya differ — so for all that I’ve said, I don’t know whether I’m right.”

“You’re always right.”

“Am I, now?” He feels her mouth twitch up again.

“Inarguably, my lady.” Quickly, he grasps her hips and rolls over, pulling her along so that she’s straddling his lap. She squeals, laughs, braces her hands on his chest and she _must_ feel how wildly she makes his heart beat.

He rears up a bit to catch her lips in a kiss, then falls back upon the pillows so he might look his fill of her. Her nightdress is almost sheer in the firelight, her hair down and flowing free over her shoulders, down her front, so that the ends of it tickle his bare chest.

“Jon and I had more in common, too,” he goes on conversationally, as if he’s not rubbing her hips in clear suggestion of what he’d like to be doing sooner rather than later. “More than I wanted to admit most of the time. We wanted Ned Stark for a father, wanted to be trueborn Starks, and when that couldn’t be we fucked off and tried to make a name for ourselves.” A bitter huff escapes him. “Think he did it better than me.”

Sansa caresses his face again, along his jaw, down to his chest, soothing it all away with just her touch. “Don’t dwell, please.”

“Your mother bloody well hated us both.”

“She had her reasons.” She frowns slightly at the remembrance of it, now that so much as come to pass in the after. “Whether or not they were right…”

“I know.” Theon’s hands slip down to her thighs, creeping, circling, underneath her shift. “She let us stay. Says more than plenty of other highborn ladies who would’ve kicked us out to the stables. She fussed over us well enough, but she was damn good at hiding it.”

Sansa blesses him with another smile. He’ll do all that he can to keep those coming. “What else do you remember?”

“We both wanted to be Robb’s favourite, as well.”

“A waste of time,” she says loftily. She rakes her nails lightly down his chest, making him hiss between his teeth. “I was already Robb’s favourite.”

“I certainly wouldn’t be his favourite now.” The jape breaks off into a groan when Sansa runs one hand up into his hair, while the other teases his hip bone. “For lots of reasons.”

“He loved you.” She bends forward to press her lips between his furrowed brows. “We all made mistakes, Theon.”

“Did yours ever get anyone killed?”

“I can’t say for sure.”

He looks at her, regretful, because despite everything that’s happened since, he won’t ever be able to let it all go. “I can.”

And she looks at him with understanding in her eyes, because she’s forgiven him and she’s determined to love him through it all. “You died for it.”

“And then I came back, and now I’ve got you.” His grip on her legs tighten, as if he could convince himself that this isn’t all some cruel trick, as if holding her could prove that he deserves to do so. “Not much of a punishment, is it?”

“You’ve been punished enough.” Her mouth trails across his forehead, to his temple, down to his cheek. “If you never forgive yourself, you have to at least accept that _I_ forgive you.”

He knows she does. He’s more thankful for it than he could ever express, more humbled by her sweet words than he could ever tell her. After everything, he’s far too damn lucky. But then…

Maybe this isn’t about him or what he deserves. Maybe Sansa is right, and he should have some happiness now, a happiness that she wants to give. But maybe this is about _her_ , about what Sansa deserves at the end of all this — so if what she wants is him, then Theon should learn to accept the best of himself. If he means to love her, to keep her for the rest of their days, then he has to believe that he’s good enough.

_I am hers and she is mine._

“If Robb wouldn’t have my head for any of the rest of it,” Theon says, “I reckon he’d have it for laying in bed with you.”

“Well…” Sansa sniffs haughtily to hide her smile, but it’s there now and there’s no getting rid of it. Theon feels a sense of pride that he’s the one who’s done that to her. “If I’m going to be queen in his stead, he can’t deny me my consort.”

“He’d be thrilled to hear you say so,” Theon remarks drily. But the jape fades even as she giggles at it, because she should know, too, that she’s done all which Robb set out to accomplish. “But proud enough to stick his fingers in his ears and pretend you never said such a thing at all.”

Her features are painted in hues of fondness, a sort of contentment that Theon had thought they’d never find again. But here they are and they have, and they’d done it together. They’d done it here, at Winterfell, in the home they had lost and won, and had been nearly destroyed so many times in the interim.

It is hers now, and she’s sharing it with him. It makes his heart constrict and expand and hum in his chest.

“I used to dream of marrying you, did you know?” he says as he plays with her hair. He loves her hair, so soft and long, so easily wrapped around his hands. “Your father would have claimed me for a son then.”

“You only wanted me for my name, I see,” she notes, teasing him.

“I want you for much more than that now.” He moves one hand to her arse to prove it, and her hips jerk against his when he does. “Dying does that to a man.”

“Makes a man do what, exactly?”

He grins, quick and wide and sharp at the corners. “Prioritize.”

She laughs, so much that Theon thinks she might never stop. It would be a blessing if she didn’t; it would be just what she deserves after so many hardships, so much heartache. She should have anything in the world that boasts even half a possibility of making her happy.

It’s why Theon had given himself to her, after all. Because she wants him and he wants her, and he knows that that means something to her beyond even what he can comprehend, for she loves him far more than he could ever love himself now.

But he will try, because she’s asked him to.

“I’ll have to make you my husband in truth,” she tells him, “if you insist on romancing me so.”

“Hmm,” he sighs happily, hands roaming over her free and unencumbered as she sits astride him, “I thought so, too.”

Sansa follows by example, hands flat and snaking across his chest. He can barely breathe when she does that, but that’s fine by him; he’d rather have her touch than air in his lungs.

“We should have done it sooner.” Her eyes are dark and bright and so tender as she looks at him, he thinks he might rip apart. “Time slipped away from us.”

“That’s alright, love.” He rucks up her shift, higher and higher, ‘til it’s over her head and tossed aside. He rolls them over so she’s underneath him, smiling and sighing when he brings his lips to her neck. “We have plenty of it ahead.”

For all they have lost, they have time enough now to make up for it.

**.**

When Sansa sweeps down the hall, her gown of grey and red, white and black, whispering upon the stones, men bow as she passes, and it is Theon who awaits her at the end of it. Her head is held high and he remembers that it was she who inspired him to do the same.

_Your name is Theon Greyjoy._

_If I’m going to die, let it happen while there’s still some of me left._

But she hadn’t. Theon had made sure of that then, and she’d made sure of it in all those times he wasn’t there. He is here now, though, and he’s not going anywhere unless it’s to follow where she leads.

It is Theon who places the crown upon her head, and he is the first to unsheathe his sword for her.

_“The Queen in the North!”_

The title rings through the hall, through Winterfell, through the North. The Starks are not gone, and Sansa will see to it that their name does not die. They will be more than the songs written about them — they will survive to sing the tunes.

She looks to her right, to where he stands beside her carved-wood throne. He smiles and bows his head, but his eyes never leave hers. She would not want them to.

The Drowned God had spared him, for Theon Greyjoy has a queen to serve.

 _To love._ And she loves him, too.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: i have plans to return to this universe in a few other oneshots, but hopefully for now this one will do to tide you over! kudos/comments always appreciated (and by ‘appreciated’ i mean i scream and roll around on the floor gleefully every time that email drops)


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